Balkan Karisman

Balkan Karisman comes from Istanbul, a city with an extremely rich built heritage, which surely is the source of his obsession with architectural motifs. A metropolis of intense, uncontrolled urbanization, which may have inspired his medium: generative art. His animations feature constructions that renew themselves indefinitely, according to rules defined by the artist.

Pneuma ("breath" in ancient Greek), created from a hundred high-angle shots of stadiums, is like an animated mosaic depicting the infinite movement of a circular wave, in a desire for hypnotic visual composition. The artist-programmer is interested in the laws governing the work, which he enacts himself with the help of software.

Each of the hundred images used for this project was generated with artificial intelligence: Balkan Karisman draws on the collective memory of the stadium to produce a representation that tends towards a kind of truth, as the sum of multiple icons. In this undulating visual fabric the shape of the stadium endures, resisting the endlessly repeating waves.

This circular, infinite wave is reminiscent of an Ola, a spontaneous yet surprisingly coordinated crowd movement, as if the thousands of supporters were one body around the arena. It describes the aura of the stadium, the jubilation emanating from the arena and spreading throughout the city, like a dream we hope will never end.